Neubarth's Dumb Luck Runs Out at Mecklermedia

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Neubarth's Dumb Luck Runs Out at Mecklermedia

More hot gossip from Ned Brainard's poison pen

Tales of entrepreneurial genius are standard fare by now on the media's assembly line of Internet success stories. But even before the reputation of many a one-time genius began to deflate along with the Internet bubble they rode in on, we were in love with another type of success story: the one that finds pure dumb luck is the only explanation for a company's achievements. Our favorite pure-dumb-luck Internet story has always been the tale of Mecklermedia. Once an obscure servicer of the needs of database-using librarians, Mecklermedia was swept up a few years ago in the great Net hype wave, which carried its Internet World trade shows to new heights of attendance and profit, and its Internet magazines to ... well, not quite the same thing. That may be why two weeks ago, the company announced that Michael Neubarth, the editor in chief of Meckler's flagship Internet World magazine, was "leaving to pursue other interests." What those interests might be, no one was saying, least of all Neubarth.

But the sordid circumstances of Neubarth's "resignation" had all the earmarks of a summary firing. Neubarth, Flux friends familiar with the intimate details say, was abruptly and unexpectedly informed of his demise late on a Friday afternoon, and told that a resignation, rather than a firing, would help both staff morale and his ability to collect a severance check. On Monday morning came the press release announcing his departure and replacement by trade magazine veteran Gus Venditto. We're told that Neubarth fans inside and outside the magazine are more than a bit upset that the change also signals an abrupt shift in *Internet World'*s editorial direction, away from straight journalism about the Net and toward the more traditional, and infinitely more boring, business formula for trade media success: namely, rewriting press releases and avoiding, wherever possible, offending advertisers. The word around the halls of *Internet World'*s Westport, Connecticut, offices is that "social issue" coverage is out, "product coverage" is in - so if you weren't getting enough dreary "10 Best Email Utilities" features from Ziff, IDG, CMP, and now CNET, prepare yourself for more from Meckler. Given its need to fend off Softbank's billion-dollar threat to both its trade-show and publishing businesses, this may even make sense. After all, when was the last time you thought of Internet World as The New Yorker of the Net? We thought so.

While we were smart enough not to send reporters who could be suckered by every glib producer who crossed their path, we did have many a Flux friend in attendance at last week's Demo 97 conference in Indian Wells, near beautiful if boring Palm Springs, California. By all reports, the most ridiculous-and-therefore-entertaining event of the week was the demo by a company called Miros Inc. of its "TrueFace CyberWatch" product. TrueFace purportedly leapfrogs mundane security features like passwords through a tool previously found only in the most high-budget Hollywood sci-fi movies: a registry that photographs, and subsequently recognizes, the distinctive facial characteristics of those authorized for access to your computer system - or your secure vault. But when a Miros executive donned a false beard and wig in an attempt to prove that the machine would reject his features, it let him into the system anyway - proving that it was either far more powerful than Miros expected, or that pretty much any schmo in a cheap Halloween costume could waltz into, say, a nuclear missile facility protected by TrueFace. Proof, once again, that sticking to your PowerPoint presentation and avoiding your product is the surest path to successful public performance - even, perhaps, when the conference is supposed to be all about a "demo."